by John Barth
I shall later become an enthusiast of skiing, but this first attempt is merely clumsy and a little frightening: I am relieved when, at the end of the afternoon, I injure my shoulder enough to be honorably hors de combat for the rest of the weekend. While the others advance from the bunny hill to the novice runs, I follow Lucien de Rubempré from the provinces to Paris and through the loss of his several illusions, and sip the homemade beer I’ve brought along to reduce our expenses. I am not a great fan of either Balzac or Walter Scott. Not having expected to spend our holiday reading, I’ve brought only one book with me, a half-read Machado de Assis, soon finished and reread. I yearn for my notes and manuscript from home, especially as my shoulder stiffens and makes sleep impossible. I spend most of the night reading Balzac in a hard ugly rocker and deciding to write no more realistic fictions.
When I can take no more of the Abbé Carlos Herrera (I could take none of Captain Edward Waverly) I cast about for something else, anything else, to read. In the drawer of a crazed and knobby end table I find an inch-thick typescript of yellow copy paper bound into a school report binder, the title inked in block capitals on white adhesive tape: WHAT I DID UNTIL THE DOCTOR CAME. I read the first sentence—In a sense, I am Jacob Horner—and then the others.
The narrative is crude, fragmentary, even dull—yet appealingly terse, laconic, spent. I have no idea whether it is “true” or meant as fiction, but I see at once how I might transform it to my purposes. Now I am impatient for the precious holiday to end!
I leave the typescript where I found it; all I need is the memory of its voice. Once back in the college’s faculty housing project, I write the novel very quickly—changing the locale and the names of all but the central character, making the Doctor black and anonymous, clarifying and intensifying the moral and dramatic voltages, adding the metaphor of paralysis, the small-time academic setting, the semiphilosophical dialogues and ratiocinations, the ménage à trois, the pregnancy, abortion, and other things. Now and then, after its publication in 1958, it occurs to me to wonder whether the unknown author of What I Did Until the Doctor Came ever happened upon my orchestration of his theme. But I am too preoccupied with its successor to wonder very much.
Well. I don’t recount, I only invent: the above is a fiction about a fiction. But it is a fact that after The End of the Road was published I received letters from people who either intimated that they knew where my Remobilization Farm was or hoped I would tell them; and several of the therapies I’d concocted for my Doctor—Scriptotherapy, Mythotherapy, Agapotherapy—were subsequently named in the advertisements of a private mental hospital on Long Island. Art and life are symbiotic.
Now there is money for baby-sitters, but I don’t need them. I’ve changed cities and literary principles, made up other stories, learned with mixed feelings more about the world and Yours Truly. Currently I find myself involved in a longish epistolary novel, of which I know so far only that it will be regressively traditional in manner; that it will not be obscure, difficult, or dense in the Modernist fashion; that its action will occur mainly in the historical present, in tidewater Maryland and on the Niagara Frontier; that it will hazard the resurrection of characters from my previous fiction, or their proxies, as well as extending the fictions themselves, but will not presume, on the reader’s part, familiarity with those fictions, which I cannot myself remember in detail. In addition, it may have in passing something to do with alphabetical letters.
Of the epistles which are to comprise it, a few, like this one, will be from “the Author.” Some others will be addressed to him. One of the latter, dated May 3, 1969, I received last week from a certain Germaine Pitt, Lady Amherst, acting provost of the Faculty of Letters at “Marshyhope State University College” in Maryland. In the course of it Mrs. Pitt mentions having visited in 1967 a sort of sanatorium in Fort Erie, Ontario, “very much like the one described in The End of the Road,” complete with an unnamed elderly black physician. The lady did not mention a “Jacob Horner” among the patients or staff (she was there only briefly); but the fact that her letters speak in another context of a “Joseph Morgan” (former president of the college, whereabouts presently unknown) and a “John Schott” (his successor) prompts this inquiry.
That you have received and are reading it proves that its proximate address and addressee exist. Were they ever located in the Allegheny Valley, beneath the present Kinzua Reservoir? Are you the author of What I Did Until the Doctor Came? My having imagined that serendipitous discovery does not preclude such a manuscript’s possible existence, or such an author’s. On the contrary, my experience has been that if anything it increases the likelihood of their existing—a good argument for steering clear of traditional realism.
Do you know what happened to the unfortunate “Joe Morgan”? Are you still subject to spells of “weatherlessness” and the paralytic effect of the Cosmic View? Do you still regard yourself as being only “in a sense” Jacob Horner? That whole business of ontological instability—not to mention accidental pregnancy and illegal abortion—seems now so quaint and brave an aspect of the early 1950’s (and our early twenties) that it would be amusing, perhaps suggestive, to hear how it looks to you from this perspective. If you did indeed write such a memoir or manuscript fiction as What I Did etc., and my End of the Road caused you any sort of unpleasantness, my belated apologies: if literature must sometimes be written in blood, it should be none but the author’s.
I’d be pleased to hear from you; could easily drive over to Fort Erie from Buffalo for a chat, if you’d prefer.
Cordially,
P: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Fourth Stage of her affair. She calls on A. B. Cook VI in Chautaugua. Ambrose’s Perseus project, and a proposition.
Office of the Provost
Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
7 June 1969
John, John,
Provost indeed! What am I doing here, in this getup, in this office, in this country? And what are the pack of you doing to me?
Driving me bonkers, is what—you and Ambrose and André, André—straight out of my carton, as the children say. And I, well, it seems I’m doing what my “lover” claims to’ve devoted a period of his queer career to: answering rhetorical questions; saying clearly and completely what doubtless goes without saying.
E.g., that my apprehensions re the “4th Stage” of our affair prove in the event to have been more than justified. Every third evening, sir, regardless of my needs and wants—indeed, regardless of Ambrose’s needs and wants too, in the way of simple pleasure—I am courteously but firmly fucked, no other way to put it, in the manner set forth two letters past, to the sole and Catholic end of begetting a child. ’Appen I enjoy it (as, despite all and faute de mieux, I sometimes do), bully for me; ’appen I don’t, it up wi’ me knees and nightie anyroad, and to’t till I’m proper ploughed and seeded. In this business, and currently this only, the man is husbandly, John, as aforedescribed: husbanding his erections, husbanding my orgasms, his ejaculate. His eye like an old-time crofter’s is upon the calendar: come mid-lunation we are to increase our frequency to two infusions daily in hopes of nailing June’s wee ovum, May’s having given us the slip.
As I too must hope “we” do—yet how hope a hope so hopeless? Why, because, if this old provostial organ do not conceive, I truly fear the consequence! Silent sir (you who mock me not only by your absence from this “correspondence” but by your duly reported presence, even as I write these words, just across the Bay in College Park, to accept the honour you would not have from us. O vanity!): what I feared in mine of Saturday last is come to pass: our friend Ambrose has turned tyrant! Witness: I write this on office stationery because—for all it’s a muggy Maryland late-spring Saturday, the students long since flown for the summer, the campus abandoned till our anticlimactic commencement exercises a fortnight hence—I am in my office, winding up my desk work and putting correspo
ndence on the machine for Shirley Stickles. And I am here not at all because the week’s work has spilled into the weekend. Au contraire: since our (early) final examinations put a term, hic et ubique, to the most violent term in U.S. academic history—one which I wot will mark a turn for ill and ever in the fortunes of many a college in this strange country—there’s been little to do, acting-provostwise. No: I am here now because I’m ashamed to show myself to Stickles, Schott, & Co., and so must do my windup work by weekend and weeknight, always excepting those reserved for conjugation.
And why ashamed? Oh well, because Distinguished Visiting Professor Pitt, Lady Amherst, acting provost, semicentenarian, erstwhile scholar, erstwhile gentlewoman, erstwhile respecter of herself, goes about these days sans makeup, bra, and panty girdle, her hair unpinned and straight and parted in the middle, her trusty horn-rims swapped for irritating contact lenses and square wire-framed “grannies.” The former she tearily inserts on the days her lord and master decks her out in miniskirt or bikini (dear lecherous Jeffrey, how you would laugh now at the legs you once called perfect, the arse and jugs you salivated after across Europe!); the latter complement her hippie basse couture: ankle-length unbelted calicos, bell-bottomed denims and fringed leathers—the whole brummagem inventory of head-shop fetishes, countercultural gewgaws, radical fripperies… Lord luv a duck! In which I am led forth, yea even as I feared, to “do” (and be done in by) “bags” of “grass” (I do not even like tobacco, excepting the smell of certain English mixtures in the briars of the couth) and I-forget-whats of lysergic acid diethylamide; to throw my limbs about like a certifiable lunatic in response to the “mind-blowing” megawattage of beastlike androgynes with surreal and grammatically singular denominations: the Who, the Airplane, the Floyd, the Lord have mercy on my soul. This in the hired “pads” and horny company of the film folk, generally—young and “with it” and “together,” beautiful of body and empty of head though not unskilled, the technicians especially—among whom I feel (as surely I’m meant to) a walking travesty, female counterpart of that rouged and revolting old fop in Mann’s Death in Venice.
The drugs do not finally much alarm me: André and I “did” hashish, cocaine, and opium in Paris a hundred years ago, along with our absinthe and Caprice des Dieux. Nor does the “kinky” “scene”: la vie bohémienne was not invented by the Flower Children, and cannot startle in a single of its aspects—the dope, the dirt, the diet, the promiscuity, the neobarbarist posturings, the radical/anarchist politics, freaky costumes, and woozy occultism—anyone acquainted with Europe’s demimonde from Dandyism through Dadaism. What alarms me is me: my acquiescence in this contemptible tyrannising; my playing, at such cost to my self-image, peace of mind, and professional activity, my lover’s stupid game.
Why do I permit myself to make myself ridiculous, boogalooing with Reg Prinz, Bea Golden (no child either, flower or otherwise; but she’s got the body for it, alas, as I have not, and the looseness of limb and morals; and Ambrose, damn him, is attracted), and the “Baratarians,” as the extras call themselves? The easy, obvious, armchair answer irritates me, no doubt because it is the main truth: my guilt for having given up my own child nearly thirty years ago (but Lord, Lord!) leaves me peculiarly victimisable at the hands etc. of a man whose regnant passion is to fertilise me. The more as I am d’un certain âge, widowed, expatriate (but from what fatherland, after all?), and—in Dostoyevsky’s lovely term—“morally prostrate” from the long tantalisings of André Castine and/or his Doppelgängers. True, true, true. But the main truth is not the whole truth. Even before this rage for paternity got hold of him, I had begun to love odd Ambrose; my dozen-or-so letters to you since March must surely bear witness to this weary heart’s movement from colleaguely cordiality to appall at his first crude overtures, thence through amusement, affection, attraction, and reckless lust, to, Lord help me, love.
I love him! (It excites me to write it.) The child thing scares me: both that he demands conception and that what he demands could, just possibly, occur. Preggers, for God’s sake! These other new demands scare me: it is not in a spirit of erotic sport that Ambrose rigs me out like a high school “groupie,” but in frustration at what in an earlier “stage” he prized: that I am Older. Indeed, I believe that were I as young as the would-be “starlets” among the Baratarians—whose narcotised, strobe-lighted, easily proffered favours mio maestro does not always, I think, refuse—he would not so particularly itch to make me big; it is I he wants to impregnate, precisely despite my age. But none of these scares me so much as the possibility of his ceasing to love me (he does, John; I know it). For a little while, I trust, he must work out in this bizarre and degrading wise his rage at unalterable circumstance. I love him! And so I “frug,” I flail my arms, I wiggle my bum—and close my eyes, open my legs, cross my fingers.
Like, um, wow?
Cependant, he has conceived a longish fiction, novella-size at least, upon the theme of ritual reenactment, drafting notes and diagrams and trial passages between his bouts with me and Prinz. I had almost forgot that he is, after all, an author. He had allowed to me as how the materials were to be classical—the myth of Perseus, Andromeda, and Medusa, to be specific—and we came so near to having a proper literary conversation on the subject that for a moment I had imagined myself twenty again in fact with old Hesse, old Huxley, old Whomever, gratifying their elder flesh whilst they gratified my young mind. I actually lubricated at the prospect of exploring with my lover his lovely reading of the myth, in particular the Medusa episode, which he sees not in the Freudian way as an image of impotence and vulval terror, but (the polished shield of Athene, the reflections and re-reflections) as a drama of the perils of self-consciousness. Ambrose’s Perseus, middle-aged and ill married, his mythic exploits and heroic innocence behind him, once again “calls his enemy to his aid” (Ovid’s happy phrase, for Perseus’s use of the Gorgon’s head to petrify his adversaries), attempts to reenact his youthful triumphs, comes a cropper, but with the help of a restored and resurrected Medusa—whose true gaze, seen clearly, may confer immortality instead of death—transcends his vain objective and becomes, with her, a constellation in the sky, endlessly reenacting their romance.
A pretty conceit! Go, man, go, I wanted to cry, sincerely for a change. But no sooner do I voice my delight—my ardent delight that “Arthur Morton King” intends to speak once again to the passions instead of playing his avant-garde games—than Ambrose chills over as if Medusa’d, and makes clear to me that his main interest in the story is formal: the working out, in narrative, of logarithmic spirals, “golden ratios,” Fibonacci series. Never mind the pathos of the failing marriage and fading hero; the touching idea that Medusa loves Perseus, even after he decapitates her; the tender physics by which paralyzing self-consciousness becomes enabling self-awareness, petrifaction estellation: out came the diagrams, on graph paper, of whirling triangles, chambered nautili, eclipsing binaries, spiral galaxies! And I am stripped and stood, not for ritual insemination (it had been but two days since the last), much less the simple making of love, but for his measuring whether, as he had read was the average case with Caucasian women, the distance from my feet to my navel was .618+ of my overall height—i.e., Phi, the golden ratio!
I was low-phi, lower-spirited. If I speak lightly, it is for the same reason that I speak at all: to drown out your thundering silence, to delay my going mad. In the same spirit I have begun your Goat-Boy novel and the preparation for the press of Andrew Cook IV’s four-letter family history. They have this connexion: the fictional prefatory letters to your novel pretend to dispute the factuality of the text; but my factual preface to and commentary upon Cook’s letters to his unborn child must address and if possible resolve the question of their authenticity. I am full of doubts—on account not only of their dubious source and questionable motive, but of such textual details as the inconsistently idiosyncratic spelling, some apparent anachronisms (e.g. counterinsurgent, which my Oxford English Dictionary does not
even list, though it attests counter-revolutionist back to 1793 and insurgent back to 1765), and a vague modernity in their preoccupation. Yet it seems not impossible that they are genuine—the stationery and calligraphy strike me as authentic, though of course I’ll check them out—or at worst corrupted copies, on old paper, of authentic originals, perhaps altered to some ulterior purpose, like the notorious Henry Letters they allude to. As a historian of sorts, I must of course make a proper inquiry. As a quondam intimate of André Castine, I know how futile such an inquiry may prove against an artful doctorer of letters. As a too tormented human being, I am tempted to rush them into print, in some uncritical journal of local history, to the end of precipitating what they’re supposed to precipitate, and hang the consequences!
But I have not quite lost my professional grip: had not, anyroad, as of Thursday last, the day before yesterday, when I bethought me to drive across the Bay “to Annapolis, maybe even Washington,” beard A. B. Cook VI in his den, have done with mysteries, confront him with (copies of) the letters, and pin him down once for all on his relation to “Henri Burlingame VII.” The film company have finished the first round of location shooting in Cambridge and “Barataria” on Bloodsworth Island, and are dispersed, to regroup next week on the Niagara Frontier for the second round (Where do the Falls figure in your fiction? I had thought it all set in Maryland or in Nowhere); Ambrose was busy with slide rule and mechanical-drawing instruments—strange tools for a man of letters! So I slipped out of 24 L with a briefcaseful of proper attire, endured the smirks of attendants at the first service station on Rte 50 (who surely took me for a superannuated whore) in order to fetch the key to the Ladies and change from mini to midlength, do up my hair, harness in the old tits and turn—what relief!—and, for the first time since the weekend, look my proper self (the chap checked my credit card as if for fraud). Then over the bridge to Chautaugua, Md, on the south shore of the Magothy, and up a certain shrubberied drive to a letterbox marked COOK.
